5 Bizarre Video Games

In the distant galaxy of Bleurggh, an evil (but reasonably stupid) band of
aliens picked up some of Earth’s television signals. Unfortunately for them,
they could only tune in a wildlife program. They figured the Earth would be a pushover to invade, so they disguised themselves as it’s inhabitants- penguins! Word of the invasion has reached those champions of intergalactic do-goodery, Bernard and Rodney. Now, with their help, you must prevent the alien mutant penguins from triggering the Doomscale and destroying the Earth. Are you up to the challenge?

This game was released for the Mighty Atari Jaguar… and what a game it is!

You get to control either Bernard or Rodney, who run around with either a baseball bat or a frying pan…..

the task is to simply kill the evil penguins! It sounds very simple but it isn’t…. You don’t start with either weapon…. nope you have to collect little “gremlins” and take them to “chests”…

The more “Gremlins” you take to the “Chests” the quicker they open them….

“Then you get a weapon” I hear you cry?…. NO!

That would be too easy. Opening them reveals anything from special weapons like dynamite and glue, to the letters that spell out the main weapon of your character. For example, to get the pan, you must open the three chests containing the letters ‘P’, ‘A’ and ‘N’.

“So once you’ve got your main weapon you go about killing the penguins?” Don’t be so silly! you have to hit the alien Penguins and then collect the “power orbs” they drop. This increases the power of your weapon until eventually you can kill the alien Penguins….. but be careful not all Penguins are Alien Penguins! The good Earth penguins are on your side and are needed in the game.

“So the point is to kill the Alien Penguins?” Pretty much….

This is the Doomscale!

The good Penguins are on the left and the Alien Penguins are on the right…. you need to make sure the good penguins out weight the bad alien penguins….

and that’s pretty much it…..

Collect the “Gremlins” to open the “Chests”…. Open the “Chests” to get a weapon…. Hit the bad penguins to power up your weapon….. Kill all the bad penguins with your super weapon… make sure the Doomscale never has more bad penguins than good penguins….

How to be a complete bastard

How to be a complete bastard advert

Dear Games Player,

I am a Complete Bastard and now is your chance to learn how from a
real expert. Members of the SPG, elected tory MPs and Astra drivers
don’t need this.
However, if you’ve always wanted to be the sort of person who loosens
the screws from the handles in disabled toilets or sets up a business
marketing Space Shuttle Jigsaw Puzzles, this game is just what you’re
looking for. If you’ve already read my book carefully then you’re well
on your way to being a Complete Bastard and if you haven’t get out and
buy it NOW … I need the cash.
It’s basically pretty easy to blag your way into a yuppie party -then
all you have to do is make all the invited guests leave and you can
have the place to yourself. Of course by then you won’t want to stay
there because the house will be completely wrecked – but who cares?
Yes – that’s what being a Complete Bastard is all about.

Have fun you half-baked Bastard,

Ade

SEXY ADE
Adrian Edmondson BA(stard)

This game was released as a tie-in with a “comedy book”.

In the game you wander around a yuppie house party trying to make yourself as unpopular as humanly possible in the shortest possible time…..

You get to carry two items at once but can only use them at certain drunkenness levels….

You have a Drunkometer, smellometer, weeeometer and a fartometer.

So basically you run around being a twat and making people leave the party…

The party house itself is in 3D!!! as this is a spectrum game you would expect them to have displayed it in isometric form like so many other “3d” spectrum games but the developers have gone for a unique 2 window 2d display…. which is quite confusing at first but you get used to it…

I could go on about how you can cover the toilet seat with clingfilm, get pissed, drink paint, piss everywhere, fart everywhere etc…. but i’ll just give you a link to a JAVA Emulator where YOU can play this wonderful creation…. Click Here!

Skool Daze

In the role of our hero, Eric (or any other name you decide to call him and the rest of the cast), you know that inside the staffroom safe are kept the school reports. And, being Eric, you realise that you must at all costs remove your report before it comes to the attention of the Headmaster.

The combination to the safe consists of four letters, each master knowing one letter and the Headmaster’s letter always coming first. To get hold of the combination, you first have to hit all
the shields hanging on the school walls. Trouble is, this isn’t as easy as it looks. Some of them can be hit by jumping up. Others are more difficult. You could try and hit a shield by bouncing a pellet off a master’s head whilst he is sitting on the
ground. Or, being Eric, you may decide to knock over one of the boys and, whilst he’s flattened, clamber up on him so that you can jump higher.

OK. So all the shields are flashing wildly, disorientating the poor masters. Knock them over now and, before they can stop themselves, they’ll reveal their letter of the code. All except for the history master, of course, who because of his great age and poor eyesight can’t be trusted to remember. His letter has been implanted into his mind hypnotically. To make him reveal it, you must find out the year he was born (which, in case
you were wondering, changes each game). Then, creep into a room before he gets there and, if the board is clean, write it on the blackboard. When he goes into that room and sees his birthdate he will, as if by post-hypnotic suggestion, give away
his letter.

Now that you know all the letters of the combination, all you have to do is work out which order they go in. You know that the Headmaster’s letter is always first, but as for the other three… you’ll just have to try the various possibilities. Find
a clean blackboard and write out a combination. Rush back to the staffroom and jump up to reach the safe with your hand. If nothing happens, then the combination must be wrong, so you’d better find another clean blackboard and try a different one.

With the safe open, your troubles still aren’t over, as the flashing shields are rather a giveaway. To stop them flashing, you now have to hit all of them again.

Done it? Congratulations! You are now allowed, along with all your friends, to move on to the next class at school. But remember, there will be reports at the end of this term…..

SCHOOL RULES

————
Boys shall attend lessons as shown in the time- table at the bottom of the screen. (Remember that because you cheated in the exams last year, you always go to the same lessons as the swot.)

Boys do not score points by attending lessons, but may be given lines if caught in the wrong place.

Boys who acquire over 10,000 lines shall be expelled immediately from the school.

Boys are not allowed to enter the staffroom or the Headmaster’s study. Take care.

At playtime, boys are supposed to be playing and not in any of the classrooms.

Boys shall not hit their schoolmates.

Boys shall not fire catapults.

Boys are expected to walk quietly in the corridors – they are not for running or sitting in.

School dinners are compulsory.

Boys will be neat and polite at all times.

Got all that??? This game is impossibly hard…

10,000 lines sounds like a lot of lines but it really isn’t… The teachers regularly give you 300-700 lines if they see you jumping, sitting on the floor, firing your catapult, punching, being on the ground after having been punched/hit with a catapult among many many other things…

Getting all the shields is an impossible task as timing your catapult so you can hit people at the exact right moment is VERY hard…

This game was so popular they made another “School simulator” called Back2skool or “Back to skool” which has the added bonus of a “Girls School” where you can kiss your girlfriend to get rid of some lines!

In 1993 they released Haunting starring Polterguy… and what a bizarre game it was!

Your task was to scare away 4 members of the Sardini family from their home.

You do this by possessing various items around the house…. These items do some random “Scary” thing which then makes whoever you tried to scare run from the room.

You then have to follow them to another room and scare them again until they leave the house.

You can see in the image above that there is a green bar….. This indicates your Ectoplasm level…. when this reaches zero you can no longer posses anything and need to gather more ectoplasm in the dungeons….

Although its a bizarre game… it is quite fun first time round but most definitely not one for the long term!

It’s a Knockout

For those not in the know, Its a Knockout was a TV show from Britain which itself was based on a TV show from France….

It was invented entirely for the amusement of this man….

Stuart Hall

In the show shit-hole towns from around the UK played stupid games against each other for a free trip to some shit-hole town in Europe, where again they get the chance to play more stupid games all whilst Stuart Hall laughs at them! (I can call them shit-hole towns as my local town was on this show against 2 other towns and they won…. and got the chance to go to Europe to play against shit-hole towns from around Europe!)

Such a genius idea for a tv show…. How couldn’t they make a game of this!

What fun!! So with all these amazing possibilities what games would they choose for this specturm game????

“Those sound interesting” i hear you say…. but bear in mind that this is for the ZX Spectrum and it only has 48k of memory! so thats 8k of memory per game….

Bronte Bash….

Here you move a “one ton” weight from left to right and then drop it on the head of what apears to be a dinasaur… you appear to be on some tropical actively volcanic island too…. but thats neither here or there.

Harlem Hoppers….

What egypt has to do with Harlem i’ll never know…. This game consists of you running back and forwards attached to a bungee rope whilst some pharoe drops balls down the back of a deformed camel… i think you are supposed to catch the balls but this is pure luck as the trajectories the balls take off the camel are completely random… Again why the fuck is this called “Harlem Hoppers”?

Titanic Drop….

In this game they seem to have raised the Titanic so that you can zip-line off of it and try and get through different coloured inflatable rings… timing is everything and even then sometimes your character drops straight down rather than as gravity intended….

Obstacle race….

This is your standard button basher with some easily navigatable walls and water obstacles…. the only problem is the giant balls that are impossible to get past!! no mater what you do you will always end up flat on your face…. Unlike most races

Diet of worms…

In this game you barely control what appears to be a giant bird… you have to try and eat worms… only its impossible to control as you can only go left and right but your bird randomly goes up and down too… i say randomly as i have no idea how to make it go just up or down…. it just goes up and down….

and finally Flying Flans…..

In this game 2 Giants hit a board and fire pies over a wall to you and you are supposed to catch them… You play that waiter over on the right. As more and more pies land on the ground the harder it becomes to move left and right as presumably the floor is getting slippy… Probably the best game out of a horrible bunch…

Unfortunately unlike SkoolDaze no one has remade this game yet… although i fully expect them too for the Nintendo Wii as it is one of those shite games with minigames!

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[…] Monkey Review added an interesting post today on 5 Bizarre Video GamesHere’s a small readingAttack of the Mutant Penguins. Attack of the Mutant Penguins Box Front Attack of the Mutant Penguins Box Back Attack of the Mutant Penguins Title Screen In the distant galaxy of Bleurggh, an evil (but reasonably stupid) band of aliens picked up some of Earth’s television signals. Unfortunately for them, they could only tune in a wildlife program. They figured the Earth would be a pushover to invade, so they disguised themselves as it’s inhabitants- penguins! Word of the […]

[…] Monkey Review put an intriguing blog post on 5 Bizarre Video GamesHere’s a quick excerptAttack of the Mutant Penguins. Attack of the Mutant Penguins Box Front Attack of the Mutant Penguins Box Back Attack of the Mutant Penguins Title Screen In the distant galaxy of Bleurggh, an evil (but reasonably stupid) band of aliens picked up some of Earth’s television signals. Unfortunately for them, they could only tune in a wildlife program. They figured the Earth would be a pushover to invade, so they disguised themselves as it’s inhabitants- penguins! Word of the […]